Samaahmadian Technological literacy
A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log))1 is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first). Until 2009 blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject. More recently "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, interest groups and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into societal newstreams. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users. (Previously, a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.) A majority are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites.2 In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs, but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.3 There are high-readership blogs which do not allow comments, such as Daring Fireball. Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important contribution to the popularity of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs , videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts. In education, blogs can be used as instructional resources. These blogs are referred to as edublogs. As of 16 February 2011, there were over 156 million public blogs in existence.4 On October 13, 2012, there were around 77 million Tumblr5 and 56.6 million WordPress6 blogs in existence worldwide. According to critics and other bloggers, Blogger is the most popular blogging service used today. A weblog or blog, is a listing of text, images, or other objects that are arranged in a chronological order that first started appearing in 1998. Blogs are often maintained and run by a single individual, updated daily, or contain random personal remarks about a topic, a personal ramble, an update on the person's life or their current feelings. In many ways, many weblogs are like a personal journal, diary or a look into another individual's life and can be a great way to learn about people, events, places, and much more from millions of people around the world. Some examples of software and services that users use to create and start their own weblogs are Blogger, Manila, Movable type, MySpace, LiveJournal, Radio Userland, typePad, WordPress. Short for Web log, a blog is a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author What is web log file? Web log file is log file automatically created and maintained by a web server. Every "hit" to the Web site, including each view of a HTML document, image or other object, is logged. The raw web log file format is essentially one line of text for each hit to the web site. This contains information about who was visiting the site, where they came from, and exactly what they were doing on the web site. A Blog is the short form for Weblog. It is an online journal or log that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site and its purpose and the topics are as wide ranging as the individuals who update them. There are blogs on everything from philosophical musings, to daily activities to commentary on the Internet, social issues, and politics. Some blogs allow readers to respond to the entries and provide their own commentary. The essential characteristics of a blog are its journal form, typically a new entry each day, and its informal style. The author of a blog is often referred to as a blogger. People who post new journal entries to their blog may often say they blogged today, they blogged it to their site, or that they still have to blog. Network Solutions offers WordPress and BlogEngine.NET on our Web Hosting packages. You are also welcome to install your own blog application, if you prefer. Aggregator An aggregator, also known as a "feed reader," "RSS reader," or "feed aggregator," is an online program or client software that collates syndicated web content (referred to as "feed"), like blogs, podcasts, and vlogs from various sources into a single location for convenience, in effect creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper." Through the use of aggregators, time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates is reduced, as the aggregator itself will check the sources for updates at user-determined intervals. Aggregators are a common feature of portal sites, modern internet browsers and email programs. A single browser display or web application is used for a consolidated view of all the syndicated content coming from various sources, which are usually supplied in the form of RSS, RDF/XML or Atom. There are also more advanced methods of aggregating feeds, such as AJAX coding techniques and XML components known as "widgets." The syndicated content that is aggregated is described as being "pulled" to the subscriber, in contrast with content "pushed" through email and instant messaging. It is much easier for a user to unsubscribe from "pulled" material than it is for "pushed." Unwanted "pushed" content is also referred to as "spam." There are two types of aggregators: web-based and client software. 1) Web-based aggregators are online applications available through the internet and made accessible anywhere to a user with an internet connection. Under web-based aggregators, there are two subsets: personal web-based aggregators, which display user-defined content; and planet sites, which aggregate community blogs in a centralized location. Examples of personal web-based aggregators include My Yahoo, Pageflakes, Google Reader and Bloglines. Most examples of planet sites, such as Planet Planet and Planet Parrot, are prefixed with the word "planet," as they are named after the original Planet aggregator. 2) Client software aggregators are applications installed by users. They collate web feed subscriptions into a single application with a user-friendly interface, often resembling the three-panel composition (subscriptions are grouped in the left-hand frame, individual entries on the right) of popular email clients. They may also appear as news tickers which scroll feeds like ticker tape, or as plug-ins or extensions which are able to integrate feeds into the operating system or software applications. As an effect of the number of feed subscriptions a user has, the volume of articles in aggregators may be overwhelming at times. To address this issue, several feed readers now allow users to categorize each feed into easily navigable categories by tagging the feed with keywords. Aggregator refers to a web site or computer software that aggregates a specific type of information from multiple online sources: Data aggregator, an organization involved in compiling information from detailed databases on individuals and selling that information to others News aggregator, a computer software or website that aggregates news from other news sources Poll aggregator, a website that aggregates polling data for upcoming elections Review aggregator, a website that aggregates reviews of movies or other products or services Search aggregator, software that runs on a user's computer and fetches, filters, and organizes a specific search from various search engines Social network aggregation, the collection of content from multiple social network services Video aggregator, a website that collects and organizes online video sources Wikis A wiki (i/ˈwɪkiː/ WIK-ee) is a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser usually using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor.123 Wikis are powered by wiki software. Most are created collaboratively. Wikis serve many different purposes, such as knowledge management and notetaking. Wikis can be community websites and intranets, for example. Some permit control over different functions (levels of access). For example, editing rights may permit changing, adding or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control. Other rules may also be imposed for organizing content. Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work."4 "Wiki" (pronounced ˈwiti or ˈviti) is a Hawaiian word meaning "fast" or "quick".56 Characteristics Ward Cunningham and co-author Bo Leuf, in their book The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web, described the essence of the Wiki concept as follows. A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons. Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not. A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape. A wiki enables communities to write documents collaboratively, using a simple markup language and a web browser. A single page in a wiki website is referred to as a "wiki page", while the entire collection of pages, which are usually well interconnected by hyperlinks, is "the wiki". A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information. A wiki allows for non-linear, evolving, complex and networked text, argument and interaction. A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Many wikis are open to alteration by the general public without requiring them to register user accounts. Many edits can be made in real-time and appear almost instantly online. This can facilitate abuse of the system. Private wiki servers require user authentication to edit pages, and sometimes even to read them. Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Cito Maramba and Steve Wheeler write that it is the "openness of wikis that gives rise to the concept of 'Darwikinism', which is a concept that describes the 'socially Darwinian process' that wiki pages are subject to. Basically, because of the openness of wikis and the rapidity with which wiki pages can be edited, the pages undergo a natural selection process like that which nature subjects to living organisms. 'Unfit' sentences and sections are ruthlessly culled, edited and replaced if they are not considered 'fit', which hopefully results in the evolution of a higher quality and more relevant page. Whilst such openness may invite 'vandalism' and the posting of untrue information, this same openness also makes it possible to rapidly correct or restore a 'quality' wiki page. Editing wiki pages There are many different ways in which wikis have users edit the content. Ordinarily, the structure and formatting of wiki pages are specified with a simplified markup language, sometimes known as wikitext (for example, starting a line of text with an asterisk often sets up a bulleted list). The style and syntax of wikitexts can vary greatly among wiki implementations, some of which also allow HTML tags. Designers of wikis often take this approach because HTML, with its many cryptic tags, is not very legible, making it hard to edit. Wikis therefore favour plain-text editing, with fewer and simpler conventions than HTML, for indicating style and structure. Although limiting access to HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) of wikis limits user ability to alter the structure and formatting of wiki content, there are some benefits. Limited access to CSS promotes consistency in the look and feel, and having JavaScript disabled prevents a user from implementing code that may limit access for other users. Increasingly, wikis are making WYSIWYG editing available to users, usually by means of JavaScript or an ActiveX control that translates graphically entered formatting instructions into the corresponding HTML tags or wikitext. In those implementations, the markup of a newly edited, marked-up version of the page is generated and submitted to the server transparently, shielding the user from this technical detail. However, WYSIWYG controls do not always provide all of the features available in wikitext, and some users prefer not to use a WYSIWYG editor. Hence, many of these sites offer some means to edit the wikitext directly. One example of this move to WYSIWYG editing is the Mediawiki visual editor, which was released as an alpha version for editing Wikipedia on December 12, 2012.nMost wikis keep a record of changes made to wiki pages; often, every version of the page is stored. This means that authors can revert to an older version of the page, should it be necessary because a mistake has been made or the page has been vandalized. Many implementations, like MediaWiki, allow users to supply an edit summary when they edit a page; this is a short piece of text summarising the changes. It is not inserted into the article, but is stored along with that revision of the page, allowing users to explain what has been done and why; this is similar to a log message when making changes to a revision-control system. Navigation Within the text of most pages there are usually a large number of hypertext links to other pages. This form of non-linear navigation is more "native" to wiki than structured/formalized navigation schemes. That said, users can also create any number of index or table-of-contents pages, with hierarchical categorization or whatever form of organization they like. These may be challenging to maintain by hand, as multiple authors create and delete pages in an ad hoc manner. Wikis generally provide one or more ways to categorize or tag pages to support the maintenance of such index pages. Most wikis have a backlink feature, which displays all pages that link to a given page. It is typical in a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite others to share what they know about a subject new to the wiki. Linking and creating pages Links are created using a specific syntax, the so-called "link pattern" (also see CURIE). Originally, most wikis used CamelCase to name pages and create links. These are produced by capitalizing words in a phrase and removing the spaces between them (the word "CamelCase" is itself an example). While CamelCase makes linking very easy, it also leads to links which are written in a form that deviates from the standard spelling. To link to a page with a single-word title, one must abnormally capitalize one of the letters in the word (e.g. "WiKi" instead of "Wiki"). CamelCase-based wikis are instantly recognizable because they have many links with names such as "TableOfContents" and "BeginnerQuestions." It is possible for a wiki to render the visible anchor for such links "pretty" by reinserting spaces, and possibly also reverting to lower case. However, this reprocessing of the link to improve the readability of the anchor is limited by the loss of capitalization information caused by CamelCase reversal. For example, "RichardWagner" should be rendered as "Richard Wagner," whereas "PopularMusic" should be rendered as "popular music". There is no easy way to determine which capital letters should remain capitalized. As a result, many wikis now have "free linking" using brackets, and some disable CamelCase by default. Searching Most wikis offer at least a title search, and sometimes a full-text search. The scalability of the search depends on whether the wiki engine uses a database. Some wikis, such as PmWiki, use flat files.10 MediaWiki's first versions used flat files, but it was rewritten by Lee Daniel Crocker in the early 2000s to be a database application. Indexed database access is necessary for high speed searches on large wikis. Alternatively, external search engines such as Google Search can sometimes be used on wikis with limited searching functions in order to obtain more precise results. However, a search engine's indexes can be very out of date (days, weeks or months) for many websites. the first wiki, or user-editable website, launched on 25 March 1995 by Ward Cunningham as part of the Portland Pattern Repository (the website was also later known as "WardsWiki"); the Perl-based application that was used to run it, also developed by Cunningham, which was the first wiki software (it was later renamed "WikiBase"); the original general term for wiki websites; and the original term for wiki software. The software and website were developed in 1994 by Cunningham in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier. The concept was based on the ideas developed in HyperCard stacks that Cunningham built in the late 1980s.123 On March 25, 1995, he installed the software on his company's (Cunningham & Cunningham) website,c2.com. Cunningham came up with the name WikiWikiWeb because he remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee who told him to take the Wiki Wiki Shuttle, a shuttle bus line that runs between the airport's terminals. "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian language word for fast. Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, so he initially thought about calling it "QuickWeb", but later changed his mind and dubbed it "WikiWikiWeb". History Main article: History of wikis Wiki Wiki Shuttle at Honolulu International Airport WikiWikiWeb was the first wiki.11 Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in Portland, Oregon, in 1994, and installed it on the Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web." Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual "card stacks" supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed Vannevar Bush's ideas by allowing users to "comment on and change one another's text." In the early 2000s, wikis were increasingly adopted in enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project communication, intranets, and documentation, initially for technical users. Today some companies use wikis as their only collaborative software and as a replacement for static intranets, and some schools and universities use wikis to enhance group learning. There may be greater use of wikis behind firewalls than on the public Internet. On March 15, 2007, the word wiki was listed in the online Oxford English Dictionary. Implementations Wiki software is a type of collaborative software that runs a wiki system, allowing web pages to be created and edited using a common web browser. It is usually implemented as an application serverneeded that runs on one or more web servers. The content is stored in a file system, and changes to the content are stored in a relational database management system. A commonly implemented software package is MediaWiki, which runs this encyclopedia. See the List of wiki software for further information. Alternatively, personal wikis run as a standalone application on a single computer. WikidPad is an example. Or even single local HTML file with JavaScript inside – like TiddlyWiki. Wikis can also be created on a "wiki farm", where the server side software is implemented by the wiki farm owner. PBwiki, Socialtext, Wetpaint, and Wikia are popular examples of such services. Some wiki farms can also make private, password-protected wikis. Note that free wiki farms generally contain advertising on every page. For more information, see Comparison of wiki farms. Trust and security Controlling changes "Recent changes" redirects here. For the Wikipedia help page, see Help:Recent changes. History comparison reports highlight the changes between two revisions of a page Wikis are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. Thus, while wikis are very open, they provide a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages. The most prominent, on almost every wiki, is the "Recent Changes" page—a specific list numbering recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame.16 Some wikis can filter the list to remove minor edits and edits made by automatic importing scripts ("bots"). From the change log, other functions are accessible in most wikis: the revision history shows previous page versions and the diff feature highlights the changes between two revisions. Using the revision history, an editor can view and restore a previous version of the article. The diff feature can be used to decide whether or not this is necessary. A regular wiki user can view the diff of an edit listed on the "Recent Changes" page and, if it is an unacceptable edit, consult the history, restoring a previous revision; this process is more or less streamlined, depending on the wiki software used. In case unacceptable edits are missed on the "recent changes" page, some wiki engines provide additional content control. It can be monitored to ensure that a page, or a set of pages, keeps its quality. A person willing to maintain pages will be warned of modifications to the pages, allowing him or her to verify the validity of new editions quickly. A watchlist is a common implementation of this. Some wikis also implement "patrolled revisions," in which editors with the requisite credentials can mark some edits as not vandalism. A "flagged revisions" system can prevent edits from going live until they have been reviewed. Trustworthiness Critics of publicly editable wiki systems argue that these systems could be easily tampered with, while proponents argue that the community of users can catch malicious content and correct it. Lars Aronsson, a data systems specialist, summarizes the controversy as follows: Most people, when they first learn about the wiki concept, assume that a Web site that can be edited by anybody would soon be rendered useless by destructive input. It sounds like offering free spray cans next to a grey concrete wall. The only likely outcome would be ugly graffiti and simple tagging, and many artistic efforts would not be long lived. Still, it seems to work very well. High editorial standards in medicine have led to the idea of expert-moderated wikis.21 Some wikis allow one to link to specific versions of articles, which has been useful to the scientific community, in that expert peer reviewers could analyse articles, improve them and provide links to the trusted version of that article.Noveck points out that "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation." On controversial topics that have been subject to disruptive editing, a wiki may restrict editing to registered users. Security The open philosophy of most wikis, allowing anyone to edit content, does not ensure that every editor is well-meaning. Virtual vandalism can be a major problem. On larger wiki sites, such as those run by the Wikimedia Foundation, vandalism can go unnoticed for a period of time. Wikis, because of their open access, are susceptible to intentional disruption, known as "trolling". Wikis tend to take a soft-security approach to the problem of vandalism; making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent damage. Larger wikis often employ sophisticated methods, such as bots that automatically identify and revert vandalism and JavaScript enhancements that show characters that have been added in each edit. In this way vandalism can be limited to just "minor vandalism" or "sneaky vandalism", where the characters added/eliminated are so few that bots do not identify them and users do not pay much attention to them. The amount of vandalism a wiki receives depends on how open the wiki is. For instance, some wikis allow unregistered users, identified by their IP addresses, to edit content, whilst others limit this function to just registered users. Most wikis allow anonymous editing without an account,but give registered users additional editing functions; on most wikis, becoming a registered user is a short and simple process. Some wikis require an additional waiting period before gaining access to certain tools. For example, on the English Wikipedia, registered users can rename pages only if their account is at least four days old. Other wikis such as the Portuguese Wikipedia use an editing requirement instead of a time requirement, granting extra tools after the user has made a certain number of edits to prove their trustworthiness and usefulness as an editor. Basically, "closed up" wikis are more secure and reliable but grow slowly, whilst more open wikis grow at a steady rate but result in being an easy target for vandalism. A clear example of this would be that of Wikipedia and Citizendium. The first is extremely open, allowing anyone with a computer and Internet access to edit it, making it grow rapidly, whilst the latter requires the users' real name and a biography of themselves, affecting the growth of the wiki but creating an almost "vandalism-free" ambiance. Edit wars can also occur as users repetitively revert a page to the version they favor. Some wiki software allows an administrator to stop such edit wars by locking a page from further editing until a decision has been made on what version of the page would be most appropriate. Some wikis are in a better position than others to control behavior due to governance structures existing outside the wiki. For instance, a college teacher can create incentives for students to behave themselves on a class wiki they administer, by limiting editing to logged-in users and pointing out that all contributions can be traced back to the contributors. Bad behavior can then be dealt with in accordance with university policies. Potential malware vector Malware can also be problem, as users can add links to sites hosting malicious code. For example, a German Wikipedia article about the Blaster Worm was edited to include a hyperlink to a malicious website. Users of vulnerable Microsoft Windows systems who followed the link would be infected. A countermeasure is the use of software that prevents users from saving an edit that contains a link to a site listed on a blacklist of malware sites.Communities Many wiki communities are private, particularly within enterprises. They are often used as internal documentation for in-house systems and applications. Some companies use wikis to allow customers to help produce software documentation.[28 A study of corporate wiki users found that they could be divided into "synthesizers" and "adders" of content. Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders' contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work. In 2005, the Gartner Group, noting the increasing popularity of wikis, estimated that they would become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. Wikis can be used for project management. Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries. In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing, strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work. In the mid-2000s, the increasing trend amongst industries toward collaboration was placing a heavier impetus upon educators to make students proficient in collaborative work, inspiring even greater interest in wikis being used in the classroom. Wikis have found some use within the legal profession, and within government. Examples include the Central Intelligence Agency's Intellipedia, designed to share and collect intelligence, dKospedia, which was used by the American Civil Liberties Union to assist with review of documents pertaining to internment of detainees in Guantánamo Bay;needed and the wiki of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, used to post court rules and allow practitioners to comment and ask questions. The United States Patent and Trademark Office operates Peer-to-Patent, a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to examination of pending patent applications. Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park. Cornell Law School founded a wiki-based legal dictionary called Wex, whose growth has been hampered by restrictions on who can edit. There also exist WikiNodes which are pages on wikis that describe related wikis. They are usually organized as neighbors and delegates. A neighbor wiki is simply a wiki that may discuss similar content or may otherwise be of interest. A delegate wiki is a wiki that agrees to have certain content delegated to that wiki.needed One way of finding a wiki on a specific subject is to follow the wiki-node network from wiki to wiki; another is to take a Wiki "bus tour", for example: Wikipedia's Tour Bus Stop. Domain names containing "wiki" are growing in popularity to support specific niches.needed The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web36 and ranks in the top 10 among all Web sites in terms of traffic.37 Other large wikis include the WikiWikiWeb, Memory Alpha, Wikivoyage and Susning.nu, a Swedish-language knowledge base. Medical and health-related wiki examples include Ganfyd, an online collaborative medical reference that is edited by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts. The four basic types of users who participate in wikis are reader, author, wiki administrator and system administrator. The system administrator is responsible for installation and maintenance of the wiki engine and the container web server. The wiki administrator maintains wiki content and is provided additional functions pertaining to pages (e.g. page protection and deletion), and can adjust users' access rights by, for instance, blocking them from editing. Growth factors A study of several hundred wikis showed that a relatively high number of administrators for a given content size is likely to reduce growth;39 that access controls restricting editing to registered users tends to reduce growth; that a lack of such access controls tends to fuel new user registration; and that higher administration ratios (i.e. admins/user) have no significant effect on content or population growth. Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly. Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself. Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.